As early as humans began dwelling in cities, efficient infrastructure became vital to the city's growth and prosperity. Modern cities' infrastructure includes below grade, above grade, and in the air infrastructure. The advent of I.O.T sensing technologies, fast computing speed, and real time ability to communicate across wide network array, expanded the “air” element to the cloud. This leap invites a reexamination of legacy urban infrastructure against current technologies for the benefit of improving infrastructure efficiency, reducing operating cost, and improving the quality of urban living. Urban planners tasked with cutting operational costs while improving the quality of urban living are constrained by budgetary limitations and typically resort to incremental changes. These changes often complicate the urban infrastructure by adding equipment with increased bureaucracies. A realistic assessment of the city's infrastructure and the actors associated with supporting the system shows:                A. The infrastructure was placed in the past and it is too costly to make drastic changes.        B. Within the city, there are departments specifically tasked with maintaining each infrastructure system.        C. The communication and cooperation between the various infrastructure and public safety departments in the city is not always good.        D. The city often depends on vendors to service the infrastructure. The vendors have a stake in making the city dependent on their services.        E. The infrastructure is broken into disciplines and for legacy reasons the disciplines offer infrastructure-specific products and services.        F. It's uncommon for city planners to present a city council a vision that revolutionizes municipal infrastructure.        
With the above noted constraints, the challenge facing a planner today is how to optimize the cities' infrastructure and support staff efficiency while minimizing expenditures. In looking for an answer, among the test questions raised is what equipment is here to stay? Another question that follows is of the equipment that is here to stay, what specific equipment can easily be adapted to state-of-the-art technology?
An analysis shows that street light poles and traffic poles are ideal candidates for such integration. The street lights by municipal ordinances are set apart at repeated intervals throughout the city and traffic poles are set at major intersections. Both street lights and traffic lights are permanent vertical real estate structures with power input. The investment cost was paid for in years past.
Current systems and methods for a networked system of smart light pole devices are limited in both their ability to gather data relating to its local environment as well as their ability to communicate data relating to its local environment to additional smart light pole devices in the network. For example, current smart light pole devices do not have the capability of transmitting and/or receiving information and/or instructions from a first smart light pole device directly to a plurality of additional smart light pole devices. In these cases, a centralized server/node must be implemented to relay information and/or instructions from a first smart light pole device to a plurality of additional smart light pole devices. This method of information and/or instruction transmission is slowed and can be prone to outside security risks. Furthermore, using a relay system may negatively affect the real-time transmission of information and/or data, reducing the effectiveness of the overall system.
Street poles dot our modern landscape, from city parks to parking lots and from pedestrian walkways to commuter roadways, just to name a few. Some of these street poles are also illumination poles. Illumination poles serve to illuminate their respective surroundings to provide visibility in darkly lit environments and/or during the night hours when there is a natural absence of light. By supplying visibility in environments otherwise low on light, these illumination poles provide value to a community through an added measure of safety, security, and convenience.
With reference to roadways, illumination poles can be set up at intersections to assist both vehicle and pedestrian traffic in safely navigating the intersection in low-light settings. In addition, thereto, illumination poles can be set up along roadways at predetermined intervals, depending on the illumination capabilities of the luminaire attached to the pole and the light intensity desired by the municipality, to assist both vehicle and pedestrian traffic along the roadway. City parks, parking lots, garages, walking paths, and other common areas also utilize illumination poles in a similar fashion.
But with the advent of the technological revolution, including advances in power generation, power distribution, and power and data connectivity as well as a variety of electronic devices having increasingly better processing capabilities and connectivity, municipalities are beginning to use these advances to transform their respective landscapes into “smarter” landscapes. For example, conventional traffic lights and conventional illumination poles, and their accompanying structures, are becoming increasingly populated with additional lighting and non-lighting related devices that improve the lights' and poles' collective utility to the community. Cameras are sometimes mounted on traffic lights to monitor traffic flow. Photocells are sometimes mounted on illumination poles to automate the activation of light from the luminaire in low-light conditions.
However, this transformation of the traffic light or the illumination pole to include additional lighting and/or non-lighting related devices is not without problems. Consider, for example, that adding, removing, or somehow altering components of the illumination pole may compromise the structural integrity of the pole itself. Changes to the illumination pole may create structural weaknesses or introduce susceptibility to corrosion. Also, changes to the illumination pole may not only diminish the aesthetic architectural appeal originally intended by the designer but also degrade the uniformity and beauty of the illumination poles chosen by the municipality. Mounting after-market cameras and/or additional products to an illumination pole may diminish the original aesthetic appeal by creating unsightly structural configurations and wiring and by introducing unpleasant disparity between poles.
In addition, changes to the illumination pole may prevent the proliferation of additional improvements and/or components due to inadequate space allocation on the pole. For example, a device manufacturer's interest in the illumination pole is limited to its respective discipline. If, therefore, one device is added to the pole that monopolizes space allocation, then it could be possible that other device manufacturers may be dissuaded from pursuing future improvements to the pole due to the lack of space. In other words, the first discipline to occupy the pole could do so at the expense of other disciplines to follow. Such inefficiency is not beneficial to the municipality or the citizens thereof.
The lighting industry is transforming from electromagnetic to electronic technology. Similarly, electronic technology is developing electronic devices with increasingly better processing capabilities and connectivity. Yet, despite the lighting industry becoming more and more interested on incorporating intelligent systems or “smart” systems to provide a variety of lighting system functions, few advances have been made in developing efficient, economical, and aesthetically pleasing smart illumination poles, due at least in part to historical legacy, complexity, and cost. Each individual developer of design improvements carries with it costs associated with research and development, upfront equipment purchase, installation, operation, and maintenance.
In view of the foregoing, there is thus a need in the lighting industry for an apparatus that can establish standards and methods for device cohabitation on illumination poles, as these poles are increasingly included in the smart grid revolution. The present disclosure addresses these concerns.